Nice little project that has been keeping me busy for this last while: building a fake Super8 projector for a theatre play. For his piece “Quitter la terre” Joel Maillard wanted a Super8 projector – but this can be a bit fiddly and unreliable on stage, also light output of original Super8, is quite poor. Turn around time is too long, every new idea has to be shot, sent to the lab, edited by hand back into the movie. Too much time passes in between for the short theatre production times. I first imagined to retrofit a real vintage projector with a small LED video beamer, but I finally decided to build one from scratch.

Drawing

Design was made on a beach in Greece in Sketchup:

Laser cutting

All pieces (over 100) are then color coded by thickness, copied and laid out flat in Sketchup, exported to DXF using this plugin and laser cut from 3mm and 5mm HDF sheets, 10mm plywood, and 3mm and 10mm acrylic.

Glue, fill and paint

Then after some rounding of the edges, sanding all faces, filling unwanted holes and sanding again, a first layer of acrylic primer is sprayed on.

Some more sanding with fine (400) paper, more filling and more sanding later we can roll on the final colour.

Internal support structure

Mechanical buttons and shutter

Film transport and video playback is started with a big turning button. This button also moves a mechanical shutter that blocks all light from the beamer when the projector is supposed to be “off”. Projected black is never totally black, and I don’t want any error messages or logos appear by accident.

Film guide and lens

To support the illusion a real film is transported from one reel to the other, but it has to be outside of the video projectors light path, so a construction made from laser cut acrylic guides the film around the beamer.

Sketchup drawing…

… and assembled filmguide.

The “lens” is just a tube assembled from several laser cut wood circles.

Probably all control could have been implemented directly on the Raspberry Pi, but my Pi-Fu is still weak – that’s why the script running is just a lazy copy-pasta from here and here, every thing else is done on the Arduino.